NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1660 Ti becomes the fifth card based on Turing to be released, but unlike the RTX cards we’ve seen up to this point, the 1660 Ti foregoes Tensors and RT cores in favor of delivering a more competitively-priced product, and an all-around enticing competitor. Let’s see how it stacks up against NVIDIA’s own lineup, and AMD’s competition.

A Look At GeForce GTX 1660 Ti & Our Test Suite

The second GeForce release to come out in 2019 becomes the GTX 1660 Ti, a Turing-based card that’s just a bit different from the others (as its GTX moniker implies). Gone are the Tensor and RT cores, but retained are the other performance perks that came along with Turing, leading to some surprising performance in select games and benchmarks.

NVIDIA dropped RTX features off of the GTX 1660 Ti for the simple fact that the card is not powerful enough to take proper advantage of those features. We were a bit surprised when the 2060 came out with RTX features, but it ultimately delivered enough performance to justify them.

Key features Turing brings to the table, even to the GTX 1660 Ti, includes concurrent FP/INT operations, benefiting games that heavily use both floating-point and integer operations. Far Cry 5 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider can use a lot of both in certain areas of the games. NVIDIA notes that in SotTR, 38% of the game’s instructions are integer on average, and lo and behold, the 1660 Ti performs great there.

Turing also supports variable rate shading, allowing games to take advantage of adaptive shading to reduce load in unimportant parts of a scene, putting most of the GPU horsepower towards what will actually prove beneficial to the scene. So far, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus takes advantage, and we have no choice but to wait to learn about more.

The GTX 1660 Ti includes GDDR6 just like the RTX cards, and it’s spec’d at an impressive 12Gbps. With this TU116 design, NVIDIA delivers 288GB/s of memory bandwidth, which is 50% higher than the GTX 1060’s 192GB/s.

NVIDIA says that against the GTX 1060, the 1660 Ti can give us significant performance boosts, upwards of 50%. That alone means that it’s worthy of consideration by those who own a 1060, because a 50% gain is no joke. But compare it to the GTX 960, which came out in 2015. In that match-up, the 1660 Ti is about 2.2x faster, so if you are still rocking that one, this 1660 Ti would be a tempting upgrade path.

Admittedly, it might be safe to remove some 10-series cards from this table, but for the sake of showing what both generations offer, they’re useful to keep for now, even if it’d be silly to purchase a 10-series card when an equivalent 20-series card is available (and now 16-series…)

The 1660 Ti slots in rather close to the RTX 2060, which justifies its $70 premium with some extra performance, and the inclusion of Tensor and RT cores. Whether or not that premium is worth it is really up to you, but it’s nice to see the price gap isn’t that extreme between them.

And with that, we’ll get into a quick look at our test methodology, and then jump on the test results.

Since the time AMD’s GPUs were originally tested, newer drivers have released, such as the latest: 19.2.2. We retested the RX 590 at 1080p using that 19.2.2 driver, and found no difference in performance. We also tried to run the same tests again on Vega 56, but couldn’t get past the driver install in time.

Games Tested & Vendor Neutrality

A total of eight games are included in our current test suite. Recent additions include Battlefield V, Forza Horizon 4, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Beyond these eight titles, UL’s 3DMark and VRMark, as well as Unigine’s Superposition, are used for some quick and dirty tests that you may be able to run at home.

Here’s the full list of tested synthetic benchmarks, games, and developer allegiances:

For our apples-to-apples testing, the graphics settings seen above apply to every one of our tested resolutions so as to deliver easily comparable results. In most cases, each configuration is tested twice, with more runs added if the initial results make the extra testing necessary (which isn’t required too often). Note that VSync is disabled at the driver level to prevent games from enabling it without us noticing.

Rob Williams

Rob founded Techgage in 2005 to be an 'Advocate of the consumer', focusing on fair reviews and keeping people apprised of news in the tech world. Catering to both enthusiasts and businesses alike; from desktop gaming to professional workstations, and all the supporting software.